Lynn Michaels

by The Dreaming Pool

  Of course. Magdalena—Josefina. It was Spanish, or Mexican perhaps. Eslin picked up the photograph again and studied Marco Byrne’s face. His coloring was certainly dark enough. She yawned again, felt her eyes drifting shut, and made a note as she pushed the papers aside and rolled over on her left side to ask Ethan if Byrne was half Spanish.

  The dream came slowly, like ribbons of color squeezed from tubes of paint. They smeared and bled together across the canvas of her mind, pooling into still, green water ringed by dusty trees and beaten earth paths. A light wind rustled the boughs and sunlight sparkled on the deep, dark water. Laughter echoed in her head, laughter, splashing, and a rough scraping sound she couldn’t identify. There were voices around her but she couldn’t understand what they were saying. She was sitting on a wooden bench, looking down at the smooth, mossy rocks lining the banks of the green pool and listening to the water lapping at them in small sucking whispers.

  Someone was calling her name. She could hear it faintly above the murmur of the wind in the trees overhead. She knew she should answer but couldn’t pull herself away from the reflection of her face wavering on the surface of the green water. A pebble struck the pool near her and the image broke into smooth rings. She watched her face bobbing away from her, and in the center of the rings saw a towering rock sculpture begin to take shape. It was a mountain. An oddly shaped mountain that she knew she’d seen before. It had two humps, like a camel but not like a camel, more like a—

  “So here you are.”

  It was Gage’s voice, so close to her left ear that she started and whirled on the bench. Flames flickered in his eyes and in the horseshoe nail hung around his neck.

  “You can’t get away from me, don’t you know that by now?” His voice warbled unnaturally and his body began to waver and undulate. “You’re mine and I’m never going to let you go.”

  He reached for her with hands that were tongues of flame. His face wasn’t his face—it was Marco Byrne’s.

  Screaming, Eslin shot up in bed, her eyes wide but unfocused. She blinked once, saw the curl of gray smoke and the lick of yellow fire flickering at the foot of her bed, then nothing else as a dark-sleeved arm swung across her line of vision and pain exploded like breaking glass inside her head.

  Chapter 13

  The scream woke Gage from a sound sleep and launched him out of bed. The ligaments in his sore shoulder twisted as the terrified scream reverberated inside his head.

  Dear God, my mother.

  Shouting at Ethan, he ran to the door, flung it open, and lurched into the hall.

  “Eth-an!” he bellowed again as he ran down the corridor.

  He heard a door scrape open behind him and a spill of light gleamed off the tiles just ahead of him.

  “Gage, what in hell—”

  “Mother!” he shouted, skidding to a halt outside Rachel’s room. “Mo-ther!”

  Praying that she locked her door as he’d cautioned her to, Gage turned the doorknob and pushed. The heavy, carved oak door opened.

  The bedside lamp was on, and Rachel was just pushing herself up in bed, sleepy eyed. He sagged with relief and bewilderment against the door.

  “What is it, Gage?” Rachel demanded testily.

  “You didn’t scream?” he asked, frowning.

  “Not yet,” she warned. “But I might, if you don’t have a damn good reason for waking me up”—she glanced sharply at her bedside Big Ben—”at two-thirty in the morning.”

  “I heard someone scream.” Gage wheeled out of the doorway. “If it wasn’t you—”

  “Whoa, little brother.” Ethan gently caught his shoulders in his hands. “I’ll check on Josefina and Ramón. You stay here with Mother.”

  “Like hell,” Gage retorted, trailing him out into the semi-dark corridor. “I’m coming with you.”

  “Stay here,” Ethan repeated as he hurried downstairs and Gage started after him.

  At the bottom of the steps leading down to the gallery, Ethan flipped on the chandelier, rounded the curve in the main staircase, and disappeared into the atrium, faintly lit by the reflection cast by the huge amber glass fixture. Slowed by his throbbing shoulder and the sharp pain in his side, Gage followed. He’d no sooner reached the last step than Ethan came out of the sun-room, yawning and scratching his disheveled hair.

  “Josefina and Ramón are sound asleep.” He stopped a few feet shy of the staircase, thrust his hands on the hips of his green-striped silk pajamas, and cocked his head to one side. “Are you sure you didn’t scream?”

  “Funny, Ethan.” Gage smirked. “Very funny.”

  “Maybe one of the horses.”

  “My hearing’s not that good.”

  “Bad dream, then.” Ethan shrugged. “Better go back to bed, you look pale.”

  “Better comb your hair, your bald spot’s showing.”

  “Funny, Gage.” Ethan smirked back at him as he passed him on the bottom step and started upstairs. “Very funny.”

  As the sound of his brother’s footsteps echoed away above him, Gage hooked his left elbow around the iron newel-post and leaned there, frowning. Bad dream? No way. The scream had been as real as the cold wrought-iron filigrees biting into his taped-up rib cage. But where had it come from? There was no one else in the house but his mother, Ethan, Josefina, and Ramón, and himself.

  “Gage?” Rachel called. “Come to bed.”

  “In a minute, Mother,” he answered, still frowning.

  “Did you take the pain medication the doctor sent out?”

  “No, Mother,” he retorted sharply. “I’m not on a bad drug trip here. Someone screamed.”

  He heard her sigh, and her slippers scrape against the tiled floor.

  “You used to have dreams like this when you were a little boy. You’d wake up crying and screaming, only you couldn’t remember the dreams or what had wakened you.”

  “For God’s sake, Mother,” he shot back at her angrily, “I’m a little old for nightmares.”

  “Are you?” she returned quietly. “You’ve been living in one for the last six weeks.”

  Gage turned around then, but she was gone. A second later he heard her door shut and the firm click of the lock. Jesus Christ, he’d done it again. He climbed the stairs wearily to the gallery and turned off the chandelier.

  As darkness closed around him, something black and cold rushed up the stairs toward him. The hair on the back of his neck rose, and he flipped the chandelier on again, and whirled—

  But there was nothing there.

  Gage fell back against the stucco wall and shut his eyes. The amber glow against his closed lids felt warm and comforting. What in hell was the matter with him? He wasn’t ten years old, he hadn’t had a bad dream, he’d heard someone as clearly—

  The fear came back, the sick, icy clutch in his gut. His heart began to pound and he nervously raised his right hand to his neck chain. The horseshoe nail lying against his breastbone was cold, so cold it made his fingers burn. It should have been warm, and his throat went dry as he remembered that it had lain warm in his palm after Eslin had found it—when it should have been cold.

  Dropping the neck chain against his chest, he gripped the iron banister and hauled himself up the steps two at a time. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do, but he had to get dressed—just in case.

  Ignoring the pain in his side, he ran down the corridor past Ethan’s closed door and switched on the overhead light as he entered his room. From the back of a brocade chair where he’d flung them earlier, he swept up his jeans and shed his faded, blue cotton pajama bottoms. The sling he left on the bedpost where he’d thrown it Monday night, but it still took him a good five minutes to curse and zip himself into his pants, and bite his lip against the fiery pain in his shoulder as he tugged a black knit shirt over his head, and poked his arms through the short, ribbed sleeves. He didn’t take time for socks, just shoved his feet into his broken-down old Dingos and snatched his denim jacket off another chair as he made for the doo
r.

  His boot heels echoed all the way downstairs, across the atrium, the sun-room, and into the study. As he swung himself into Ethan’s mahogany leather chair behind the desk, he flipped on the lamp, opened his brother’s leather-bound address book, and lifted the tab marked H. Precise, organized Ethan had listed her phone number as well as her address. Repeating the latter under his breath, Gage winced again as he stretched across the desk, lifted the beige receiver from the telephone, punched Eslin’s number, and listened to the line ring… and ring, and ring.

  Maybe she wasn’t home, maybe she slept sounder than Ethan … or maybe she didn’t answer because she couldn’t.

  On the twentieth-odd ring Gage slammed the receiver back in its cradle and knew what he had to do.

  Five minutes later he was behind the wheel of the Lincoln. The pain in his ribs and right shoulder had convinced him to take his brother’s car because it was easier to drive than his own Jeep. On a day with little traffic it took twenty minutes to drive from Roundtree to Santa Barbara. In the middle of the night with patches of fog drifting across the road, he figured at more like half an hour.

  Fifteen minutes into the drive, with the long black ribbon of night highway stretching away from the headlights and the fear subsiding within him, Gage thought that he was crazy, that he’d undertaken this wild goose chase in the wee hours of the morning as an excuse to see Eslin again. After all, if he’d really thought something was wrong, why didn’t he just call the police? It would’ve been a lot faster.

  But no, he decided, this was better. This way he could prove to himself once and for all that insanity ran in his family. Eslin’s house would be dark and quiet, he’d wake her up—and then he’d have to stand there on her front porch looking and feeling like a jackass. Frankly, he couldn’t think of anyone who deserved it more.

  So he kept telling himself, yet his palms began to sweat on the leather-padded steering wheel as he turned it awkwardly around the corner onto Eslin’s block. All the houses were dark except one—a small, white stucco bungalow in the middle of the street that was lit up like a neon sign. Party time, Gage thought, as he drove the Lincoln past the brightly lit house and rolled his window down partway to read the number.

  In that same second he saw her little blue Toyota in the carport, and the fear slammed into him, cold and hard like a fist in the solar plexus. Oh, Jesus Christ. He hit the brakes and with tires squealing he turned into her driveway. He bailed out of the Lincoln and ran up to the front door. A stab of pain shot down his arm as he jerked the screen door open and caught it against his right shoulder, but he clenched his teeth and rammed his left fist into the wooden storm door.

  “Eslin!” He shouted. “Es-lin!”

  He found the bell, lay on it with his thumb, and kept calling her name. She didn’t answer, and out of the corner of his right eye he saw a light wink on in the house next door.

  “Shit,” Gage muttered, as he let the screen door bang shut and dashed down the walk into the carport.

  When he pushed against the back door it swung open. “Oh, Christ,” he groaned, his voice trembling as he lurched into the house.

  His own ragged breathing rasped in his ears as he ran through the kitchen, glanced into the empty living room, and started down the hall toward the two rooms that opened at the end. When he entered the one on the right, he came to a heart-stopping halt.

  “Oh, God, no,” he moaned.

  Eslin lay spread eagled, face up on the bed, her arms thrown wide, her fingers slightly curled. There was a thin trickle of blood on her pale forehead and the blue-dotted sheet beneath her. She wasn’t wearing much, just a lacy white teddy. Her chest wasn’t moving.

  Gage started into the room, but his legs gave out on him beside the bed. He went down hard on his knees. Rocking back on his heels, he dragged the sleeve of his jacket across his eyes.

  His arms were quivering, his stomach knotting, and his right hand trembled visibly as he raised it to her throat, held his breath, and pressed two fingers to the pulse point beneath her jaw. Her skin was warm, her pulse weak—but she was alive.

  “Thank God.” He sighed.

  Pushing himself up, Gage looked past Eslin’s prone body at the nightstand. No telephone. He headed for the kitchen, found the phone on the pine-paneled wall, jerked the receiver off its cradle, and punched 911. When the ambulance dispatcher answered, he snapped Eslin’s address and slammed the receiver down.

  It missed the switch hook and fell against the wall behind him, but he couldn’t have cared less. The worst of the shock at finding her had passed, the adrenaline surge that had carried him this far had congealed into a sickening rock in his stomach, and all he wanted to do was find the sonofabitch who’d done this and kill him.

  I will, too, Gage swore, as he went back to the bedroom. If it’s the last thing I ever do I’ll find him and I’ll kill him.

  Walking around the foot of the bed, he stopped suddenly when he saw the half-burned hole in the blue shag carpet, the charred remnants of the manila folder and the blackened, flame-cracked leather album. He hadn’t seen Ganymede’s baby book in years, but he knew what it was without bending over for a closer inspection. He knew what the folder had contained, too, but the rage tightening the muscles across his chest evaporated when Eslin moaned and stirred slightly on the bed.

  Gage went to her and rested his right knee on the mattress. Her forehead wrinkled as if something hurt her, then smoothed and she lay still again, except for the faint rise and fall of her chest. That was a good sign, he thought, in spite of the blood clotted in her hair. He knew it was best not to move or touch her, but all he wanted to do was to pull her into his arms and hold her. Not to make love to her, just to protect her, just to make sure that nothing like this ever happened to her again. He didn’t, though. She looked so small, so vulnerable.

  Half rising as he leaned over her, Gage tugged the only loose corner of the blue satin comforter that lay mostly beneath her out from under his knee and tucked it gently around her. He knew the paramedics would probably fling it off when they arrived, but at least she didn’t have to lie there exposed in the meantime.

  He remembered then that he’d forgotten to unlock the door for the paramedics. He pushed himself off the bed and backtracked down the hall. He’d no sooner reached the living room when the half-shut kitchen door banged open against the wall and two policemen, their guns drawn, burst into the house.

  “Hold it right there,” the first one through the door ordered, and leveled the pistol at Gage’s throat.

  He froze.

  “Do you live here?” The first policeman asked, as his partner circled past him and ducked down the hall.

  “No, I—”

  “Woman in the bedroom, Harry,” the second officer called. “Out cold, bloody gash on her head.”

  A siren wailed then, and a second later the whirling red reflection of emergency lights bled through the sheer curtain on the picture window.

  “Ambulance, Chuck!” The first officer called to the second as he waved Gage out of the middle of the room with the barrel of his pistol, and moved toward the door to unlock it. “Over here, and let’s see some ID—slow, real slow.”

  Gage followed the policeman’s instructions to the letter, fumbling awkwardly in his back pocket for his wallet as he did so. It wasn’t there, and he remembered having seen it last on the top of the dresser in his bedroom. Oh, swell.

  “I left my wallet at home,” he said, looking squarely into the officer’s bland round face.

  “That your Lincoln in the driveway?”

  “No, it’s my brother’s.”

  The front door scraped open and Gage turned to watch two paramedics trundle an empty stretcher past him, but froze again when he heard the warning click of the hammer on the policeman’s pistol.

  “Keep your eyes on me, buddy,” he ordered gruffly, “you’ve had time enough to admire your handiwork.”

  His what?

  “I found her like that,”
Gage retorted, as he swung around to face the policeman. “I’m the one who called you people.”

  “Wrong.” He smiled thinly. “You called the ambulance, the lady next door who heard you pounding on the door called us. You got a name, pal?”

  “It isn’t pal and it isn’t buddy,” Gage snapped, turning his head over his shoulder to watch the paramedics push Eslin, who was demurely covered by a red blanket, toward the front door. “It’s Gage Roundtree.”

  “Sure, and I’m Willie Shoemaker. Chuck.” The officer nodded at his partner who’d trailed the stretcher down the hall. “Check that Lincoln for registration.”

  “It’s in the glove compartment,” Gage told him.

  The second policeman nodded and followed the paramedics outside. Gage heard doors slam, saw the blinking red lights go out, then Chuck came back inside.

  “Owner’s an Ethan Roundtree,” he said, “address Roundtree Stables, Route One—”

  “My brother,” Gage cut in, smiling at the disgruntled smirk on the first officer’s face.

  “If he is, then you can call him from the station to come down and identify you.” He lowered his pistol and put it back in his holster. “Let’s go, buddy.”

  “Am I under arrest?”

  “Not yet. If you give the right answers to the right questions and if you are who you say you are, then you probably won’t be.” He nodded curtly toward the door. “C’mon, move it.”

  “You’re the man with the gun.” Gage shrugged, though it hurt like hell, and walked out of the brightly lit house into the early-morning darkness.

  Chapter 14

  Although her dreams had always been extremely vivid, Eslin thought groggily as she stirred slowly toward waking up, this particular one was stretching the point. Her head was throbbing and her neck felt stiff. She couldn’t seem to raise her eyelids. She had to think about it hard, and when she finally managed it, she gasped and shut them tightly again as the ache in her head exploded into full-blown pain.